Jerome Sans

Before becoming Director of the UCCA (Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art) (Beijing) in 2008, Jérôme Sans founded with Nicolas Bourriaud and was co-Director of the innovative contemporary art institution, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and Director of Programs at the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art (Gateshead, UK) 2002-2006. He was also Cultural Curator for Le Méridien Hotels and Resorts 2002-2006. Before these posts, he had already been an extremely prolific international curator, art author, art professor.

Courageously, he programs and curates shows for nearly unknown young artists of talent right beside the biggest names in the contemporary art world. Among the numerous exhibitions he has most recently curated or co-curated for UCCA:

STATEMENT

My wish for the UCCA is that it should become permanent, not ephemeral, and that it should become fully Chinese. We have been holding talks to make this possible, but even in Europe, it would take time to achieve this. Our goal is to finalize this within the next six months. Even then, we will not abandon it. It is not like turning over the keys to a car and walking away: we will always try to help, to make the center as much as it can be, with the same energy and dynamic. From the very beginning our desire was that it should expand. Of course, one always needs additional space for exhibitions, for offices, for storage. Our hope is to effect a progressive expansion over the long term, with the future possibility to expand with the neighborhood. We hope to expand in curatorship, with our “Curated By…” series to include very young artists with no prior solo shows to their credit. These would be curated by major artists such as Yan Peiming and Liu Xiaodong. We continue to take the line that we don’t wish to make a distinction between the young and the established. To the young, we give the same opening, the same visibility. Our responsibility is to the scene in general.